Nation: The Senate: An Individual Who Happens To Be a Negro

It was his first major address since his election, and Massachusetts’ Republican Senator Edward William Brooke III ranged the gamut of American problems —from youth to the urban crisis, from disarmament to justice for minorities. Speaking in Los Angeles last week before California Republicans, Brooke devoted a major part of his address to an eloquent review of foreign policy.

Citing St. Augustine’s axiom, “War’s aim is glorious peace,” he noted that in Viet Nam the U.S. is seeking to create “an atmosphere in which resolution of our difficulties can be found off the battlefield.” And, before a conservative audience, he urged the Republican Party to become “broader and more creative.” He ventured that the old shibboleths of “big government” and the Communist conspiracy have outworn their meaning. Added Brooke: “There is an obligation to propose rather than primarily to oppose.”

This spectrum of concern was not surprising from a man who has already demonstrated his qualifications for office. But aside from his qualifications, the dominant fact about Ed Brooke is that he is a Negro, the first of his race ever to win popular election to the U.S. Senate.* For the politics of the Negro and for the Republican Party, he signals a new style and a new hope.

The Other Vision. To many American Negroes, the acme of success is symbolized by the world of Adam Clayton Powell: the nirvana of the deprived, where the Good Life is also the Sportin’ Life, and where power cruisers, beauty-queen girl friends and expense-account junkets are the talismans of achievement. At the other pole is the Negro’s deeper vision of equality with white Americans in terms of individual intellect, ability and dignity. That vision is embodied by Senator Brooke.

His presence in the Senate is particularly significant at a time when the civil rights revolution has been deadlocked by Negro militants’ demagogic obsession with black power—an attitude that former Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel P. Moynihan describes in Commentary as “a frenzy of arrogance and nihilism.”

Brooke has never rallied his race to challenge segregation barriers with the inspirational fervor of a Martin Luther King. Unlike Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins or Philip Randolph, he has not been a standard-bearer in the civil rights movement. He has made none of the volatile public breakthroughs to equality of a Jackie Robinson or a James Meredith. He has triggered none of the frustrated fury of a Stokely Carmichael, written none of the rancorous tracts of a James Baldwin or a LeRoi Jones, drawn none of the huzzahs of a Louis Armstrong or a Joe Louis, a Willie Mays or a Rafer Johnson. He has never sought or wanted to be a symbol of negritude. There have always been two ways for members of minorities to rise: through purely individual achievement and through involvement in group action. But in the U.S., there is room for both types and, ultimately, each reinforces the other.

Says Brooke: “I do not intend to be a national leader of the Negro people. I intend to do my job as a Senator from Massachusetts.” Unlike most Negro politicians, whose manner of campaigning and representation are necessarily molded by the exigencies of ghetto living, Ed Brooke has had the great good fortune to rise in a political atmosphere in which his race is beside the point.

No Fanfare. To the enduring credit of his constituents, Ed Brooke was elected last November on his record—as a tough attorney general, as an exciting campaigner, as a Republican running in a year when millions of voters across the country felt a degree of disenchantment with the Johnson Administration.

Brooke’s color had no measurable bearing on his victory, either statistically, since Massachusetts’ Negro population is under 3%, or philosophically, since his opponent, former Democratic Governor Endicott Peabody, is as ardent a champion of civil rights as Brooke.

When Brooke arrived on Capitol Hill, his credentials were not essentially different from those of the other members of a promising G.O.P. Senate freshman class—Illinois’ Charles Percy, Oregon’s Mark Hatfield, Tennessee’s Howard Baker and Wyoming’s Clifford Hansen. “There was no special fanfare for me,” mused Brooke after taking the senatorial oath on Jan. 10. “I felt like a member of the club. They didn’t overdo it. They didn’t underdo it.” He and the other Republican tyros have seats in the same section of the Senate chamber—an area that is called “Boy’s Town.”

Toss-Up. Like those of other newcomers to the citadel, Brooke’s committee assignments were scarcely sensational. Speculation was that he would get a seat on Judiciary, which handles civil rights proposals, but the Republican leadership placed him on Banking and Currency, and Aeronautical and Space Sciences—both of which have strategic value. Banking and Currency acts on much legislation involving urban problems; the other assignment is useful because of Massachusetts’ heavy concentration of aerospace-related industries. Charles Percy was named to the same two committees, and when the question arose as to which freshman should have senior ranking, they flipped coins to decide. Brooke won both tosses.

Despite the Senate’s casual acceptance of his presence, Brooke has already become a Capitol Hill tourist attraction. Gallery-sitters crane their necks, gawk and buzz excitedly whenever he comes into view. In airport terminals and Capitol corridors, strangers grab his hand and wish him well. Letters come into Brooke’s office at the rate of 350 a day. He has received nearly 1,400 speaking invitations in the past couple of months, has rejected all of them until last week’s engagement.

Less than Bashful. “I’m cautious by nature,” Brooke explains. He has spent long hours on the Senate floor since his arrival, on occasion sitting as the only spectator while some colleague spun a solo speech. Unlike his freshmen classmates Percy and Hansen, he has not yet introduced any legislation. Nor does he expect to assault Senate tradition by making a floor speech soon. “I won’t establish a record for speaking early,” he says, “but I will not be bound by custom either. If I feel I must speak out, I will have no hesitation.”

Off the floor, he has been less than bashful about making his views known. During a briefing for new Senators by the Secretary of State, Brooke quizzed Dean Rusk insistently about continued U.S. bombing raids in North Viet Nam. As he said on a Meet the Press panel recently, Brooke feels the bombing strategy should be “reassessed” because he does not believe the raids have “served the purpose for which they were intended,” to stop enemy infiltration.

He said pretty much the same thing two weeks ago during a 90-minute private meeting with Lyndon Johnson. Nor did he hesitate to criticize House Minority Leader Gerald Ford’s handling of the Powell controversy. Arguing that Ford had made a political “blunder” by marshaling G.O.P. members behind last month’s resolution to deny the Harlem Democrat his seat, Brooke charged: “Now the Powell matter has become a Republican problem. It was the Democrats’ mess, and we should have let them stew in it.”

Brooke intends to be his own man—and that goes for liberals, Negroes and the G.O.P. alike. “I will not have my vote taken for granted,” he says. “I can be a team man, with the reservation that I can leave the team when I want to.” He favors open housing, job-training programs, seating Red China in the U.N.—all of which puts him out of step with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. More often than not, he will be voting with the Republican liberals, notably California’s Tom Kuchel, New York’s Jacob Javits, New Jersey’s Clifford Case and his fellow freshmen Hatfield and Percy.

Allies, Not Adversaries. When pressed to define his political outlook, Brooke offers such portmanteau labels as “creative moderate” or “a liberal with a conservative bent.” While accepting the humanitarian goals of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, he faults the Administration’s approach to helping the poor as “aspirin—it relieves the pain, but it doesn’t cure.” Both domestic-welfare and foreign-aid policies, he reasons, should be oriented more toward self-help and less toward the dole approach. “If you give a man a handout,” he maintains, “you establish a chain of dependence and lack of self-respect that won’t be broken easily. If that is the situation of the grandfather, then the son, the grandson, the great-grandson will probably be in the same desperate, dreary situation. But when a man wins self-respect, then everything else falls into place.”

Brooke’s votes for civil rights proposals are as certain as anything about him. Even so, his views on the issue do not reflect self-consciousness about his race. “It’s not purely a Negro problem. It’s a social and economic problem—an American problem,” he says. He sees racial problems as essentially a conflict between “haves and have-nots,” rather than between blacks and whites. He has been stonily hostile toward the concept of black power. “That slogan has struck fear in the heart of black America as well as in the heart of white America,” says Brooke. “The civil rights bill of 1966 was lost because of rioting and violence. The Negro has to gain allies—not adversaries.”

That sort of talk does not endear Brooke to the militants. Some hotheads in the rights movement virtually accuse him of being an Uncle Tom. To millions of other Negroes, his image is blurred at best. Because of his pale skin, his Episcopalian faith, his reserved New England manner, he is looked upon as what might be described as a “NASP”—the Negro equivalent of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Only two of his 19 Senate staffers are Negroes, because Brooke refuses to hire people on the basis of race; to many Negroes that in itself is grounds for suspicion. Brooke’s wife is white, and many Negroes also consider that an affront. As Massachusetts attorney general, Brooke shied away from participating in civil rights demonstrations—and that does not sit well with many Negroes.

Crossed Fingers. In fact, Brooke has worked effectively for racial equality. He helped prepare a 1950 brief that led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision to desegregate dining cars, and he has long been an advocate of fair employment practices in Massachusetts. Says Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin: “If you compare Brooke and Adam Powell on civil rights, you cannot immediately give the edge to Powell. Adam blocked granting of funds to the Urban League. He was absent for the vote on many bills, including civil rights bills.” Floyd McKissick, CORE’s national director and an advocate of black power, says that “the black community has its fingers crossed on Brooke.” But McKissick also concedes: “If one is a politician in a white state, one relies on white votes. Right? Ed Brooke is one helluva politician. He has the appearance, the education, the intelligence; he has the middle-class standards white people like. If he’s going to stay in politics, he’d better stay just what he’s been.”

No Choice. What he has been is remarkable in political history. Both of his Negro predecessors in the Senate went to Washington as symbols of Yankee vindictiveness against the South during the Reconstruction era—and both were puppet politicians. The first, an itinerant preacher named Hiram Rhodes Revels, was picked in 1870 by the Mississippi legislature, then dominated by carpetbaggers and Negroes, to fill the Senate seat once occupied by Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The other was Blanche Kelso Bruce, an imposing mulatto, who was sent to the Senate in 1875, also from Mississippi.

From Bruce until Brooke, Negro politics have been almost totally ghettoized. Negro candidates have had no choice but to accept—and exploit—residential segregation as their only viable route to political power. New York City Democrats have consistently rejected Negro candidates except in districts at least 50% black. Nationwide, the number of Negroes in elective office is increasing, but the pattern of Negro officeholders from Negro constituencies has scarcely changed. In 1966, six Negroes were elected to the House—all from heavily Negro districts. There are 154 Negroes among the nation’s 7,600 state legislators, compared with 36 in 1960; all but seven are from predominantly black constituencies. Lucius Amerson became the South’s only Negro sheriff, in an Alabama county whose population is 84% colored.

If color ever truly disappears from U.S. politics, as religion already has to a large extent, it will only be because the race issue is kept in perspective by black and white politicians alike. As Ed Brooke has said: “If I did confine myself to Negro problems alone, there would hardly ever be another Negro elected to public office except from a ghetto—and justifiably so.”

White Tie & Pig’s Feet. At 47, the new junior Senator from Massachusetts is well equipped for the challenge. Very much the cool Boston lawyer, he is an effective orator and a eupeptic campaigner. Brooke is as much at home striding in white tie and tails down the aisle at a performance of the Boston Opera (of which he is president) as he is scampering down a campaign parade route, shouting “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hello there!” He is at ease at dinner with Vice President Humphrey, Walter Lippmann and Mrs. Christian Herter, and just as comfortable with Negro friends eating “soul food,” a Porgy orgy consisting of pig’s feet, ham, fried fish, cornbread and greens—to which Brooke sometimes adds champagne. He was such an energetic salesman of bonds for Israel that a high school in that country has been named for him.

Over the years he has developed a marked zest for the subtler perquisites of success: tea at his desk at midmorning and midafternoon, stylish Ivy League suits tailored by Zareh Inc. of Boston, a treasured collection of opera records. He lavished hours last month on the selection of wallpaper, carpeting and furniture for his new two-level Potomac-view apartment (rent: $310 a month) in an integrated section of southwest Washington. He owns a $40,000, nine-room home in the prosperous Boston suburb of Newton, has an eleven-acre estate on Martha’s Vineyard.

With green eyes and a Gardol smile, he has an appeal to women that approximates Lena Horne’s impact on men. Yet for all his public charm, he is an inner-directed man in an outer-directed profession. Even his closest staff aides have accepted the fact that he insists on making key decisions alone. In his climb to the Senate, Brooke has brought to bear the caution of the colored man, the self-confidence of the mulatto, and the conservatism of a family that was civil-service oriented.

Apron-String Homilies. Ed Brooke’s ancestry, like that of many other American Negroes, is lost in the eugenic mists of miscegenation between the Negro mistress-servant and the 18th century Southern squirearchy. The Senator believes that his paternal great-grandfather was probably a slave who took his surname from plantation owners in Virginia. Brooke’s father doggedly worked his way through the Howard University School of Law, was employed for years as a Veterans Administration attorney in Washington. His mother Helen was the driving force in the upbringing of Eddie and his older sister Helene. At public gatherings, Brooke introduces his mother in almost worshipful terms. And he often recalls her apron-string homilies. On women: “Never disrespect a woman no matter how she comports herself; remember your mother is a woman.” On racial prejudice: “People are people; you take them as you find them.” On honesty: “If you can’t tell me something, all right; but don’t come and tell me something that isn’t true.”

Crash Course. Ed Brooke grew up in a pleasant northeast-Washington section called, coincidentally, Brookland, which was populated by black bourgeoisie. The family belonged to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, a favored house of worship for well-to-do Negroes —where, it was said, one minister died of sorrow because his congregation complained that his new bride was too black to sit in the pews.

After Washington’s Dunbar High School, an excellent though then segregated institution known for the number of students that it sent to Ivy League colleges, Brooke attended Howard University, where he cut an enviable swath with the coeds and was president of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Negro social fraternity. Because of an early inclination toward medicine, he majored in chemistry and zoology, graduating in 1941. On Pearl Harbor day, he was called into the Army as an R.O.T.C.-trained second lieutenant, was assigned to the all-Negro 366th Combat Infantry Regiment. He saw combat action in Italy, won a Bronze Star in 1943 for leading a daylight attack on a heavily fortified hilltop artillery battery. Because of a facility in Latin and French, he took a crash course in Italian and later worked as a liaison officer with Italian partisan guerrillas.

She Say No. Three months after V-E Day, Brooke, then a captain waiting to be shipped out of Italy, visited Viareggio, a resort on the Ligurian Sea. On the beach, he struck up a conversation with Remigia Ferrari-Scacco, the fetching daughter of a prosperous Genoese paper merchant. Recalls Remigia: “I see him five times in Italy. He come in my house. He meet my parents. He say he in love with me and he want me to marry.” She say no. However, after returning home and joining a couple of Army buddies at Boston University Law School, he began trading a steady stream of love letters in Italian with Remigia. They were married in Boston in June 1947.

Remigia, now 47, has snapping brown eyes and a husky Italian laugh. She calls her husband “Carlo,” his code name with the partisans. She herself has fought a long guerrilla campaign with the English language, but the conflict has been resolved in what can only be described as peaceful and rather charming coexistence. “If you with me a little while,” she says, “you notice that I speak almost all the time in the present sentence. My accent, I think I never lose that, because I think I have no accent.” She has made dozens of engaging campaign appearances for Ed, helped harvest the Italian vote for him. Remigia and their daughters, Remi, 17, and Edwina, 14, will stay in Newton for the time being while the Senator commutes there weekends. Although she loves meeting people, Remigia has a knack for mangling their last names (Dirksen becomes “Dirdis” or “Kirkenson”). Recently she confided her problem to a dinner partner, Vice President Humphrey, who astutely advised her: “Just call them ‘Honey’ or ‘Sweetie.’ “Vote White. Until he was 30 years old, Ed Brooke never even voted. Then in 1950, several friends suggested that he run for the Massachusetts legislature. When he told Remigia that he planned to become a candidate, she cried for a week, as she now recalls—largely because her notion of politics was based on memories of Mussolini-era Italian politicians, who were often jailed or murdered. Brooke entered both the Republican and Democratic primaries, won the G.O.P. endorsement, and has stuck with the party ever since.

He was defeated in the 1950 general election, and again in 1952, then renounced politics (partly, his friends say, because of campaign slurs about his interracial marriage) until 1960, when Republicans persuaded him to run for secretary of state. His opponent was an affable, able politician named Kevin White, and while the campaign was generally free of racial smears, one slogan that popped up—VOTE WHITE—carried an innuendo that was hard to ignore. Brooke lost narrowly.

Intrigued now by the challenge of politics, Brooke rejected an offer to join Governor John Volpe’s staff, instead asked to be appointed chairman of the Boston Finance Commission, a municipal watchdog group that had not barked in years. Brooke drew headline after headline as commission evidence led to the dismissal of some city officials.

Bolstered by his reputation as a crusader, Brooke won the G.O.P. nomination for attorney general in 1962, easily defeated a Democratic machine candidate, who was picked for the race only because the incumbent, Edward McCormack, was locked in a senatorial primary fight with Teddy Kennedy.

During his two terms in office, Brooke dealt with a variety of touchy situations. He collided with Negro leaders in 1963, when he ruled against a plan for a pupils’ hooky-for-a-day demonstration against de facto school segregation. He also clashed with both school and church by insisting that Massachusetts must observe the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against public-classroom prayers. He injected himself in the helter-skelter investigation of the Boston Strangler murders, managed to bring some coordination to the detective work, but invited ridicule in the press when he brought in a Dutch clairvoyant, who applied his “radar brain” to the case and reeled off a minutely detailed description of the wrong man. Brooke’s most celebrated accomplishment was winning a series of grand-jury indictments against more than 100 public officials, private citizens, and corporations—on charges involving graft and bribery connected with state government.

Cold Party. During his Senate campaign, Brooke responded to the exaggerated threat of white backlash by taking the unusual step—for him—of raising the racial issue. He condemned both Stokely Carmichael and Georgia’s Lester Maddox as “extremists of black power and white power.” Brooke swamped Chub Peabody by 1,213,473 to 744,761 votes and took the Senate seat occupied for 22 years by Brahmin Leverett Saltonstall.

Unlike dozens of G.O.P. candidates elsewhere, Brooke did not camouflage his party label. He made no secret of his belief that the G.O.P. needs a far more positive approach than it has had in the past. He refused to support Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, and early in 1966 he published The Challenge of Change, a prickly book that castigated the G.O.P.’s approach to the electorate for the past 50 years. Brooke’s thesis was not so much that Republican proposals have been wrong, as that “we have often had no solutions at all. We give the appearance of being afraid of social progress. This is what has made us known as the cold party.”

Measure of Success. Nonetheless, as Dirksen observes, “the Republican umbrella is pretty big”—and Ed Brooke is obviously under it to stay. In fact, his presence in the G.O.P. as a Senator offers more promise for positive change than anything he has yet said or written. And it will undoubtedly help re-establish the party’s appeal to Negro voters —some 70% of whom are now registered Democrats. Indeed in the South, where Democrats have wielded a segregationist whip for decades, Brooke’s kind of liberal Republicanism could become a major stimulant to a G.O.P. revival among black men—although, so far, Southern Republicans have all too often tried to outdo the Democrats at the segregationist game.

In a sense, Ed Brooke has a 50-state constituency, a power base that no other Senator can claim. Not only is he in a position to show his race the way out of apartheid politics; he could also wield considerable influence in the selection of the G.O.P. presidential candidate in 1968—and beyond. Though he is cagey enough not to commit himself so soon, he leans toward Michigan’s George Romney for ’68. Since more Negroes could come to resent Romney’s Mormon religion—which still has an archaic tenet that denies the “priesthood” to Negroes—Brooke would be a valuable ally in defending the Michigan Governor’s liberal record on racial issues.

Already there has been talk of a Romney-Brooke ticket, which the Senator dismisses on the ground that he must first master his new job. Yet he is plainly on a path that goes beyond whatever personal summit he may reach. The achievements of Edward William Brooke will be as much a standard of a whole society’s progress as they will be the measure of an individual who happens to be a Negro.

*Not until 1913, when the 17th Amendment was ratified, were members of the U.S. Senate picked by the general electorate; before that, state legislatures selected Senators.